Nokia 8 First Impressions

Nokia 8 is a the first true flagship Nokia phone with Android, and competes with OnePlus 5 in India

Nokia 8, the Android flagship carrying the name of the company that once ruled the mobile world, is finally in India. For many, the phone represents the realisation of a long-held dream: a Nokia smartphone that has high-end specifications and runs Android. The Nokia 8 was first unveiled at an event in London in August and as promised, the phone made its India debut at an event in New Delhi on Tuesday. Priced at Rs. 36,999, the smartphone will go head to head with the likes of OnePlus 5, and here are some early thoughts on the smartphone.

In terms of design, the unibody Nokia 8 has everything befitting a premium smartphone, with the 6000 series in both matte and glossy finishes lending it a very nice feed. At 7.90mm, the phone is relatively thin - especially for a phone with a 3090mAh battery - and thanks to the curved edges, it feels even thinner and is pretty easy to deal with on a day to day basis.

The big highlight of the smartphone, of course, is its camera, with HMD Global going to town to market the phone’s unfortunately named ‘bothie’ capabilities - the ability to capture pictures and videos from both the rear and front cameras at the same time. You can also live stream ‘bothie’ video to Facebook and YouTube, a feature we tested out without any problems.

HMD is also leveraging its relationship with Nokia to bring some technology from the latter's 360 VR camera to the Nokia 8. The smartphone comes with high dynamic range microphones, which enables it to record surround sound using Nokia Ozo Audio algorithms. HMD says its software encoding will preserve the virtual surround sound even when users share these videos on social media.The front camera is the same 13-megapixel RGB shooter seen on the rear, and both front and rear cameras are capable of recording 4K video on their own. The rear camera comes with laser autofocus and dual-tone LED flash.

In terms of specifications, the Nokia 8 is a powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 SoC, which powers nearly all other Android flagships of this generation. It comes with 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, and support for microSD cards of up to 256GB capacity. As expected, India gets the dual SIM variant of the smartphone (1 nano-SIM + 1 nano-SIM/ 1 microSD card). Stay tuned to Gadgets 360 for a detailed review of the Nokia 8.